The process of applying coating materials on surfaces of objects is a common operation in a large variety of industrial processes.
As used in the art, the term “coating” may denote either the verb, e.g., the operation of applying coating material, such as by spraying, or the noun, e.g., the coating material itself. In the industrial domain, a “coating material”, or simply a “coating”, is a layer of a substance spread over an object surface for protection, functional and/or decoration purposes.
Coating materials applied to base materials may be used to provide properties not inherent in the base, including corrosion, wear-resistance, conductivity, color, solderability, and others.
Examples of coating materials are paints, lacquers, metal platings, thermal-barrier coating materials, anti-corrosion coating materials, and other types of protective, functional or decorative coating materials.
The amount of coating applied on a product object surface, that is, the coating thickness, is important to the product final use and cost.
In fact, for quality, security, marketing, and cost efficiency purposes, a coating operation is required to meet certain levels in terms of the achieved thicknesses and uniformity levels of the coating layer.
Those skilled in the art know that there are several types of coating application techniques and coating guns, the usage choice depending on a large variety of factors (e.g., the type of coating material used, the type of object surfaces, industrial requirements, physical properties, chemical properties, and many other factors).
Due to the fact that, in several industrial processes, coating operations may be performed by coating guns mounted on robots, simulations of automated coating processes are used in order to achieve the desired levels of production optimizations.
In fact, as some coating materials may be highly expensive and as production time may often be a critical factor, an efficient technique for simulating the coating process on three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment may reduce design and material costs, shorten process time, and provide to satisfy the desired quality standards, engineering goals, and security levels.
The models required for exact calculation of the applied coating thicknesses on object surfaces in industrial automated processes are very complex, since they depend on the multiple physical, chemical, geometrical, and kinematic factors of all the elements involved in the coating procedure.
In the art, there are known solutions that attempt to predict for each applied coating droplet the expected contribution to the total spread coating thickness based on the droplets physical properties.
Unfortunately, such coating thickness calculation techniques are complicated and very time consuming, since they require complex calculations to be performed on a huge number of coating droplets.
In the field of industrial automation, the fact that the coating thickness calculation techniques are too slow is particularly problematic, since as a consequence to it, also the corresponding industrial process optimization is slowed. In fact, some of these coating thickness estimation techniques have a calculation time of several hours or of a few days with common computation power.
In order to overcome the problems in terms of slow performances and calculation complications of such known solutions, improved techniques are desirable.